


What worries you, masters you

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Abolition, American Civil War, Conversations, Gen, John Locke - Freeform, Philosophy, Reading, Slavery, off-screen romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 13:30:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12190860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Emma asks a question. Can he answer her?





	What worries you, masters you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dancingontheedge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingontheedge/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Boar Bristle Brush](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12034773) by [dancingontheedge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingontheedge/pseuds/dancingontheedge). 



It was a Tuesday, an ordinary, unprepossessing Tuesday at Mansion House, a day of day-old mutton stew and boiled turnips, of gangrene and two leg amputations, the laundresses in the side-yard wielding their paddles against the cauldrons’ sides and Anne Hastings wielding her seemingly infinite spite indiscriminately. Jed was tired and his right wrist ached, an old man’s ailment. He wanted nothing more than to retreat to his room with the French journal he’d saved for just such a grey afternoon or to sequester himself in the library with the limp, week-old newspaper a pretense to ensure he’d be left alone by everyone except Mary. She had a way to telling from only a glance whether he needed to be cheered or soothed, whether he would welcome the latest anecdote about cheeky Private Caldwell or might be better suited to expound on some surgical advance he recalled from the Paris operating theaters. She hardly ever came to him without some token—a bit of biscuit wrapped in a cloth, an apple still blushing, a slim volume of verse or a delightfully fat edition of Dickens she’d discovered tucked in a glass-fronted bookcase—and she always managed to graze his hand with hers as she offered her prize. She could not, did not, disguise the small curve to her lips his touch brought her and if he was not satisfied, he could at least accept that she was not either, but that she might one day be, though no calendar held the marked date. Not now though, not while he waited for Eliza to send her response and not now while Mary was out on a rare errand in her best bonnet and pelisse, sallying forth to the general store, the postmaster, some other cobbled-together tasks she had put off for days or months of days when she was working on the wards, rising before dawn to begin again, even on Sundays.

He had to remind himself that Mary was not at Mansion House when he glimpsed the dark-haired woman bent over a book at the far side of the library. The waning light was diffuse, catching the chestnut sheen of a chignon, the faint sprigged pattern on the calico blouse, the delicacy of a slender hand turning pages. Something about that hand, flicking through the pages impatiently, telegraphed a frustration he recognized and he found himself stepping into the room and closing the door behind him softly. 

Emma was so absorbed she did not look up until he stood beside her shoulder. Jed didn’t try to make out the title or the text, more interested in the darkness of Emma’s blue eyes, the way she bit her lip and lowered her brows. He’d never seen her so unconscious of herself.

“Has it said there are no happy endings?” Jed asked, meaning to tease, to mock her gently but finding his question was more serious than he’d intended. That it revealed more of his own fears than his experience. Mary would have noticed and noticing, would have made an apt rejoinder, understanding that he wanted to be consoled with wit, all her affection in her tone and not her words. If Emma apprehended his concern, it was nothing to what compelled her.

“Dr. Foster, do you ever think, do you find you don’t understand anything at all? That everything you thought you knew…was wrong?” Emma answered. He could not have been more taken aback had she spouted Beowulf in Old English. He found himself at a loss for words.

“I have been reading everything that I could find in my father’s library since I was a little girl, you see, and I have been reading and re-reading Locke, John Locke, and I think, I don’t know anything. Nothing that I thought I did,” she went on, as if he had encouraged her instead of standing silent, managing not to gape. It was the longest conversation they had ever had. She was usually taken up with nursing the Confederates or making oblique little comments in the direction of Henry Hopkins, as arch as she dared. Jed hadn’t had time for her nor she for him. And yet, now, this confession—

“The hoopskirt assassin a bluestocking? Will wonders never cease?” he quipped, unable to resist. She gave him a look then, one which Mary would have nodded at and Matron guffawed and so he made a gesture of apology with his aching right hand before he spoke again.

“I admit, I am surprised you’re asking me. Of all of Mansion House’s residents,” he said.

“But you are the only one who would understand. The others, they’re Yankees. Or the nuns, they might as well live on the moon! They couldn’t understand what you can, what we can, Southerners born and bred,” she said earnestly, pointing out a truth he had never bothered to see. Or had known it would be too painful to confront, just as he did his damnedest to forget his mother and brother, the plantation he’d grown up on, his inheritance. Even now, he turned from it and her remark. 

“Dr. Locke is giving you trouble, then?” he asked.

“Once, everything he wrote seemed so clear to me. How he described the world and men so aptly and now, if I consider it carefully, it seems to make the world nothing but confusion. Terrible shadows. Sin,” she said.

“The world has always been complicated, Miss Green. Before, when it seemed it wasn’t, that was because you were young. A child, reading an adult’s words with a child’s eye, a child’s mind,” he said. She had seemed nothing more than a pretty child when she came to Mansion House that first day, all pink ribbons, white frills, her little nose in the air and her curls bobbing. The girl had gone by degrees. Now, there might be nothing of her left.

“Nurse Mary said, that first day, she said it was time to put childish things away. If I was to stay here, work here,” Emma said. He could hear how Mary would have said it, not harsh but direct, offering a suggestion in the midst of all her other work. Her hands would have been busy with a task, possibly one he’d set her. She would have quoted the verse perfectly but so easily it would not have seemed she was reciting another’s words but sharing the gospel as if it were a cup of tea she offered to a friend.

“But I don’t know how to do that. Or rather, I don’t know what to do, how to understand how the world works anymore,” she paused, as if she meant to disclose something even more personal. The entire conversation was without precedent; he braced himself for what she would say next. “I thought my father was just, a kind man, but he has not treated our slaves as a kind master should. He hasn’t looked after them—they’re only numbers in his accounting book! All these boys, all broken, Tom dead—what for? Our Cause, how can it be worth dying for, suffering for—when it means so much suffering? I thought I knew right from wrong, that I did right but I can’t tell anymore,” she said.

It was impossible to answer her as he had earlier so quickly answered Mary when she spoke of morality. He had once been the same as Emma, confident in his own vision of the world, and then he had gone abroad and come back, heart-broken, had married a woman he didn’t love and left his family behind as much as he could, except when they came to him, he couldn’t turn them away. He had fallen to the needle’s lure and lashed out when he was challenged, even in the mildest way, and he had helped Samuel save Aurelia. He had realized the other man was the better surgeon. The better man. He was still, by law, a married slave-owner, in love with a widowed Abolitionist and he had no better understanding of the world than the young woman in front of him, who was twisting a loose strand of hair around her finger like a worried child.

“I can’t help feeling Nurse Mary or the chaplain could help you more,” he said. 

“She is all goodness and he’s faith. They couldn’t-- but you,” she said, breaking off.

“I’m neither, not good nor devout, eh? Well, you’re right there. I think you are more right than you know, except that it’s painful to allow yourself to be right. To have been wrong or blind, to know that even when you’re right, you’re still likely mistaken in some way and to find it, you’ll have to risk exposing just how,” he said. She nodded, acquiescing even if she didn’t entirely agree. He knew that expression, the patient who took the medicine, wanting it to work even if he suspected it wouldn’t.

“The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting. That’s Abelard, Heloise’s lover,” he added. Once, a girl like Emma Green would have blushed to hear a man who was not her husband speak to her of lovers, but she did not even blink at it. 

“He abandoned her, didn’t he, Peter Abelard?” Emma said. She was well-read, almost as erudite as Mary and Jed nearly laughed aloud to consider the company he found himself in; the hospital filled, unexpectedly, unimaginably, with a minister trained at Williams College, nurses who read Locke and Euler, nuns who spoke French, a matron who sang Robbie Burns’s songs when she got the chance, a clay pipe clenched in her lips.

“Yes. Yes and no. They wrote to each other, didn’t they? I think his point stands, regardless of his other actions. That your questions, your confusion, may lead to clarity. A relief, for those of us who can’t help doing otherwise,” Jed said. Finally, Emma smiled, a smile that would have delighted Henry Hopkins into speechlessness or made Mary’s eyes twinkle. 

“I suppose I must thank you, Dr. Foster,” she said.

“You suppose you must?”

“You never answered my question, not directly. You talked a great deal, though, and you listened. You didn’t laugh at me or tell me that I was being silly or wasting your time,” Emma replied. 

“You didn’t waste my time. And I’d venture, you’re not wasting your own either,” he said.

“There doesn’t seem to be much of it to waste. I hadn’t realized how precious it is. I hadn’t realized how precious so many things are and how worthless others,” Emma replied. She didn’t sound as tormented as she had when she first spoke; now, he heard a certain reflection in her voice, the putting-away of childish things Mary had advised. That Henry would find a way to praise when he noticed it. 

“I’ll leave you to your reading then,” he said. She smoothed a hand on the open page before her and he saw its whiteness, how finely made she was, how unscarred. He thought of other hands—Mary’s and Matron’s, Aurelia’s with the marks left by lye and blood, his mother’s and his mammy’s, all testaments if he would only attend.

“Miss Green, you wanted an answer before. Yes. I’ve discovered I have been wrong, so many times. Too many times,” he said.

“Fortitude is the guard and support of the other virtues, Dr. Locke says. That I have always understood and grasp it daily, more and more, Dr. Foster. As should you. As you do,” Emma replied. Then she turned back to her book, dismissing him without words, no longer the supplicant. He had meant to leave and now he did, knowing that wherever he went, his feet would lead him to Mary, whose convictions were a beacon, whose goodness was the balm of Gilead.

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by dancingontheedge's "Boar Bristle Brush" in which we learn about Emma Green's evolution and the role that reading philosophy played it in. I had a somewhat different take on how it might have played out. Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. His love for, and affair with, Héloïse d'Argenteuil have become legendary. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century."
> 
> John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.


End file.
